


And Every Star At His Approach Blazed Into Suns

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [16]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Agreements, Depression, Endgame, Injury Recovery, M/M, Mortality, gratuitous Gaelic, the Faceless Man is a dick, unexpected magic, with an unexpected wielder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 14:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12843465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: There are many things that Abdul swore he would never do. Allowing Thomas to be too late is top of that list, and he'll be damned if he'll give the Faceless Man that satisfaction.[Contains a big spoiler forThe Hanging Tree.]





	And Every Star At His Approach Blazed Into Suns

**Author's Note:**

> This arc started in [Fic 7](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12203229), continued in [Fic 14](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12738186) (which you will definitely need to read before this one), and concludes here. Big things are happening!

*

It took nearly three weeks after the attack at UCH for Abdul to feel like he was remotely capable of doing anything beyond lying in bed with his eyes closed, which was infuriatingly dull.

The fact that it was a comfortable and familiar bed – Thomas’s at the Folly – or that he certainly had the requisite time to do so, having been put on indefinite leave by the hospital, didn’t make it any less unbearable. He had been extremely lucky in the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of his hematoma, that he knew; and he was grateful for it every chance he got to venture downstairs and tolerate the bright lights of the outdoors for a few minutes, or to be indulged with truly astonishing amounts of Molly’s cooking, or snatch a few minutes at a time of reading the newspaper before Thomas descended upon him and warned – the irony was not lost on Abdul, though it only made him feel more put-upon – of the dangers of overexerting himself. The pain of it all was just generally inconvenient; the series of subtle headaches he had to medicate for across the course of each day meant that he existed for long stretches of at a time either in serious discomfort or a no less-alarming state of floating, drugged helplessness.

The fact that Peter was in much the same boat could only be a comfort to him in his pettiest of moods. Otherwise, it was just maddening – maddening to see the young man grit his teeth every time he re-realized that he couldn’t move around without crutches; every time he managed, in his endearingly clumsy way, to knock himself against something, his yelps bursting out all over the house; every time Nightingale went to chase Chorley’s signare around the city and Peter was left watching the Jag go from the door to the coach house in his wheelchair, lines of tight frustration around his eyes. The day when Peter realized he could use _impello_ to zoom said chair around the house without him needing to push it himself was a welcome break in the monotony, but even that novelty quickly faded, leaving them both grousing and irritated, sniping at anyone within reach or at each other, working on snatches of paperwork when they could stomach it just for something to do.

Abdul, nevertheless, took comfort where he could. He took comfort in the thunderous expressions of Seawoll and Stephanopolous whenever they came to visit and liaise, turning a series of tables in the atrium into a war room dedicated to the sole purpose of tracking Chorley down; he took comfort in Beverley’s occasional visits, including the one where she had stood in the coach house and put a cool hand on his brow, and the migraine he’d been nursing drained away like water down a plughole. Night after night, even while his sleep patterns grew more fractured as his body chafed at all its inactivity, he could take comfort in Thomas’s presence, in the warm, close wrap of him around Abdul in the dark, taut with determination.

After a month with his heavy cast, Peter was deemed far enough along in his recovery to start doing some gentle exercise and PT to maintain the muscles that were in danger of wasting in his left leg; the flurry of activity that followed, with the visits of sports scientists and handy men, led to their being, in the third week of June, a small gym of sorts set up, also in the wide-open atrium, made up of equipment that Thomas had had brought up from the boxing ring downstairs. Peter went to his task with gusto – indeed with too much, as Abdul was gently able to remind him – and Abdul found it easy to join him, wanting himself to make up for the days he had lost from his decade-old routine of a daily run to the Thames and back from Camden; he missed the fresh air, missed the adrenaline and satisfied fatigue of it, and spending time spotting Peter and cautiously taking what exercise he could of his own helped, at least a little.

It was also, unfortunately, around that time that two things happened – that his ability to sleep deserted him almost entirely, and that he discovered that the hair that was growing back in from the patch he’d had to have shaved for his surgery was white.

It was curious, he would think much later, in retrospect, how things which seemed so petty could feel so momentous, close to life-shattering. He was aware, of course, and painfully so, that sleep deprivation was something that could make even the happiest and most secure of lives paranoid and unbearable; the first truly shocking sign of his age, on the other hand, affected him in ways which he wouldn’t have thought possible. He knew, logically, that it would happen; he knew, from experience, from his family’s experience, vaguely what he could expect from his latter years (hardiness if he was lucky, dodderiness if he wasn’t, and a marked disdain for leaving home).

But none of that logic seemed to make it any easier to accept. Nor did the reading he was able to do that reassured him that mood swings were perfectly normal, indeed even expected, in the wake of head trauma, and that he was allowed, albeit briefly, to wallow in his sudden obsession with his own mortality.

These were gloomy thoughts, all wrapped up in worrying over his recovery and his future worth and whether he had turned a corner that would leave him in a place of chronic weakness – as well as in a cast-down, rainy week far greyer than summer was supposed to be, when he and Peter were kept even from the walks they had started to take, on unsteady feet and swinging crutches, around Russell Square. A morning of dim-lit work in the atrium, therefore, appeared to be their lot on the Friday of that week, with Peter taking tentative, slow steps on the treadmill, holding most of himself and his slimmer boot-cast up on its rails with the strength of his arms, and Abdul doing his best to work his way through an asana or two.

“How are you feeling today?” Abdul asked, once he was exhausted by the work of stretching out several kinks he hadn’t known he had.

“Sore,” Peter groused as he got gingerly off of the treadmill. “You?”

“Old.”

“Don’t say that,” Peter said, sounding sharper than he had probably intended as he stretched. “You’ve got a ways to go yet.”

“I’ll be sixty next year, Peter,” Abdul said, not unkindly, but needing, somehow, to say it out loud, to crystallize all the doubts he had found plaguing him into something real and acknowledged. “I can hardly avoid it.”

That was just it, wasn’t it, he thought. He couldn’t avoid it. He had learned more rapidly and painfully than he would have liked, recently, that whatever he had taken for granted could be just as rapidly and painfully taken away; that sort of shocking reversal of fortune was something he was keenly, even intimately, aware of, something he _had_ been aware of for years through his work and training. But fate or accident or biological circumstance or the cursed spectre of Martin Chorley felt almost as nothing, now, compared to the knowledge that no matter what his efforts, his path left on earth was short and shortening fast.

Thomas’s wasn’t, he reminded himself, continuing down what even he could realize was a morbid and distressing spiral of thought. Thomas’s perhaps couldn’t be – Thomas’s _shouldn’t_ be curtailed.

For the first time in years, he found himself wondering whether he had been the ultimately selfish fool, to bind himself to a man who, in returning that bond, could only lose and lose again.

He only realized he was weeping when Peter looked over at him and his eyes widened with concern.

“Hey,” Peter said, startled, and then he had a hand on Abdul’s shoulder. “Don’t – I mean – c’mon, mate, you’ll be alright – ”

Abdul was just as surprised to find his cheeks damp when he reached up to his face; whatever emotion it was that his bruised mind-body connection had interpreted as grief felt very far away from him, and the smile he was able to give Peter was mostly genuine.

“Brain injuries,” he deflected, grinning, not sure which of them he was consoling as he wiped his eyes clear. “They put you right out of sorts.”

“Sure,” Peter said, gentler, and though he left Abdul alone after that Abdul knew he was being carefully watched, over dinner and during the obligatory viewing of the night’s rugby in the coach house, and when he made his weary way to bed; he lay awake for close to two hours, thinking despite himself on the horrible gaping emptiness that was the moment when consciousness would cease – because he may have been a religious man, but even the idea of the succulent gardens and flowing paradisal rivers of Jannah suddenly held little attraction if he was to have to exist there alone.

Mercifully, the following two weeks brought on immense improvement, as though acknowledging the problem had opened the way to solving it. Most of his sleep returned, and Peter’s grins were fierce as he started to rebuild muscle mass and get around the house at close to his normal careening speeds; Thomas looked at them both over dinners, tired from his own days of work, and the relaxation in his face was visible when he could see that they were on the mend. Sensing the overall mood, Molly’s efforts in the kitchen somehow redoubled, again, and kept them fed at a rate which couldn’t help but be heartwarming.

Abdul was feeling well enough, in fact, that he started to think a few weeks ahead to taking a major excursion. He hadn’t missed London Pride since 1983, after all, and he had very little intention of letting a bang on the head break his long streak of walking with the Doctors and Dentists group, who, of course, would certainly be well-placed to support him if the summer heat or the chaos of the march did do him in on the day. Thomas frowned and quietly fussed, but seemed to know from the start that Abdul wouldn’t be dissuaded; and so, on the day of the parade, with Soho aflame with color and screaming and thudding music, Abdul met him, as had become their custom, at the corner of Regent Street and Beak Street, where Abdul, with the pockets of his white coat full of leaflets and the remnants of the bag of condoms he had been instructed to throw at passers-by, stepped up to the police barrier and reached out for Thomas’s hand.

“Hello,” he said, and felt, for the first time in weeks, like he was properly living.

“Hello yourself,” Thomas replied, smiling; he was overdressed for the heat in the suit he’d walked in from Russell Square, but looked as unflappable as ever. “How are you feeling?”

“All the better now,” Abdul grinned, and leaned over the fencing to give Thomas a very public display of affection.

(He had done this several times before, he remembered happily – once, most memorably, in the madness of the 1992 Europride parade, when, as he drew away from the kiss and disappeared back into the procession, he had been surprised to see Thomas looking after him in somewhat of a state of dismayed shock. He had only learned hours later that Nightingale’s discomfort had been due to the presence of a uniformed PC of his acquaintance standing near him in the crowd – fortunately for them both, the newly sworn-in officer, Miriam Stephanopolous, had, after staring blankly at Nightingale for a bit with her hands tucked into the pockets of her stab vest, simply said mildly that she would have to turn herself in for murder if her girlfriend were to dare to do the same to her as _she_ marched by, and that had been that.)

“I’m going to stop by Albert St,” Abdul said over the crowd, making a sudden decision to pursue even more independence. “Pick up some odds and ends. I’ll be back by supper.”

“All right,” Thomas said, nodding cautiously, his words snatched away by a wave of cheering for the next group of marchers; Abdul squeezed his hand before he turned and jogged his way back to the GLADD contingent.

He couldn’t deny that he was close to the limits of his newfound strength by the time the parade started dispersing at Whitehall in the late afternoon, and the noise of the Tube ride back up to Camden started threatening to provoke a headache; but it was a good sort of fatigue, he thought, that he was feeling as he unlocked the front door of his house for the first time in close to six weeks, and, moving idly through the stale air, went up to the first floor to start gathering some of the clothes he had missed and the books he thought he was finally ready to start reading regularly again.

Something beeped, sudden and harshly, in the quiet, as he was reaching to pull a duffel bag out from under his bed. He straightened slowly; it had sounded like the chirp of a fire alarm that needed a new battery, or –

– or, he thought suddenly, like the initial warning of his burglar alarms, cut off in mid-squeal.

Abdul pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket; it was dead without cause, unresponsive to the press of his fingers on its buttons, and when he flipped it over and prised open the back there was a trickle of sand-like material leaking out from around the edges of the battery. He swore under his breath, and stood; the house was still silent, but the light in his room had subtly changed. When he took a few careful steps over to the front windows, he found that most of the street outside seemed to have disappeared from his sight – the path to his door was visible, but otherwise it was like butter had been smeared over the windowpanes, turning everything beyond his gate distant and blurry.

There was a magical shield over the entire house, and from the smell of it it certainly wasn’t of Thomas’s making.

“Hello?” he called cautiously.

“Hello, Dr Walid,” Lesley May said. It was definitely her voice – blunt, no-nonsense, disarming. “Come down.”

Abdul thought rapidly – did the first-aid kit he kept in the kitchen include a scalpel? Was the old pen-knife his brother had once given him still in a drawer in the sitting room? His kingdom for a pair of scissors – as he looked out into the corridor and down the stairs. She was waiting at the bottom, looking up at him, her perfect face steady and eyes glittering. The tension in her shoulders, and the firm stuff of her small hands into her trouser pockets, were the only signs in her that she was taking no pleasure in being anywhere near him; he briefly wondered whether that meant he could trust her, as one of the few people who had been able to help with her care years back, before he set aside that hope for the concern of what she was doing in his house, and why he was trapped.

“Come down,” Lesley said again, and tilted her head towards the front parlour. “There’s someone here who’d like to have a chat.”

So, Abdul thought, that was it. And _this_ was it.

He came downstairs with as measured a step as he could manage; when he got to the bottom he looked briefly down the outer corridor to the dining room, where his landline phone was sitting on the sideboard, but Lesley must have found it out, and was blocking his path. He had no intention of testing her, and so he turned into the sitting room instead, and got his first glimpse of Martin Chorley.

He was – thoroughly unremarkable. Completely so, in fact, and for the briefest of moments Abdul felt a surge of petty vindication.

“Good afternoon, Dr Walid,” the Faceless Man said, from his comfortable seat in one of Abdul’s armchairs. “It’s good to meet you at last.”

“I’m afraid I can’t say the same.”

“Yes,” Chorley said, with an insincere grimace. “I suppose I ought to apologize for that spot of bother at UCH. It was most inefficient of me. If I’d done a better job of it you’d already be out of your misery.”

Abdul didn’t bother to move any further into the room. “Why are you here?”

“This and that,” Chorley said, and then he didn’t look unremarkable at all. He had the light of the damned in his eyes, the light of the lost, the strange creative light of the mad. "In fact, I've been admiring that ring of yours, since I learned of its existence," he continued, a flat smile sitting incongruously on his face. "From afar, that is. What it represents."

He paused. "Show it to me properly, won't you?"

Abdul didn't even feel the glamour's compulsion; he simply found himself across the room, with Lesley's glinting eyes following him, and holding out his hand.

"Stop it," he said lowly.

"Why should I?" Chorley said casually; he was already leaning forward, peering at the ring. "It's a magnificent piece of work, I must give him that. The wards upon it are impeccable – I suspect that if I were to attack you now, I would very much regret it."

He looked up at Abdul, then, and his smile-that-wasn't-a-smile grew sideways. "Take it off."

Abdul felt it that time. It smelled like rust and rotting leather, and inflicted a splitting headache. He had to gasp in a breath and squeeze his eyes shut against it, and the determination he had been clinging to that he would not give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing him shaken wavered. 

"Stop," he said again, into the darkness behind his eyelids; why he thought it would help he didn't know, and the pain only intensified.

"Give it to Lesley, if you please," Chorley said, mild as milk.

Abdul's hands came together of their own accord, working the ring free like he did so often, whenever he needed to wear latex or kevlar or chainmail gloves in the course of his labwork and autopsies. But this wasn't like any of those times, and the loss was almost as keenly painful as the sensations that vanished as soon as he opened his eyes again and dropped it into Lesley's waiting palm.

"There," Chorley said, deplorable despite there being no hint of satisfaction or triumph in his tone. "Now we can speak as equals."

Lesley turned away from Abdul, her eyes similarly averted – she took a few steps into the kitchen, looked back at Abdul, and then, staying in the doorway, put the ring carefully down on the granite countertop next to the oven.

"Equals," Abdul said, as his mind returned swiftly, almost disorientingly, back to calm, the agonizing press of Chorley's grip draining instantly away. "I doubt you admit anyone to being your peer."

"No, you're quite right," Chorley said thoughtfully. "But it is a concept you meddling lot appear to care about, and so it is one I must understand. Nightingale, for instance – he may one day prove a worthy challenge in a magician's duel, despite his charming proclivity to cling to old-fashioned rules. And Nightingale," he went on, looking Abdul slowly up and down, "for some reason, considers you his own equal, my dear doctor. So you see how I have an interest in cultivating an acquaintance with you."

"Is that what you call this," Abdul said. Allah help him – he wanted to laugh. The bastard was monologuing. For a brief moment, irrespective of the danger he knew he was in, he nearly felt pity for the shell of a man who held his life in his hands.

"Well," Chorley said dismissively, settling back in his chair as though he were supremely bored, "I thought you might prefer that over being called bait."

"You actually think Thomas would hesitate," Abdul said, shaking his head; he knew Chorley was not equipped to understand him even if he spoke what he knew to be true, and so he did anyway, because he needed to. "You've made a grave miscalculation."

"Indeed I do, if you were in the way," Chorley said sharply. "He would sacrifice even more for you than he would for his apprentice. That much I can understand, Dr Walid, even if I think him a fool for it.”

"You're wrong," Abdul said, stronger, and in the kitchen he heard Lesley shifting from foot to foot. "You have no idea what is constituted in our oaths. And if you think him incapable of fighting the sort of war you have been waging, I would suggest you think again."

"Don't," Chorley said; he was still playing at being unaffected, but there was real irritation in the core of his voice, and his eyes were suddenly glinting and dangerous. "Don't try to trick me into believing you, of all people, have sworn off self-preservation. I don't believe anyone is capable of that."

Abdul just smiled, and waited, and, distantly, became aware of the sound of sirens.

"Your cavalry," Chorley said, looking briefly sideways to the windows of the sitting room; Abdul took the chance to look sideways himself, at Lesley. She wasn't looking at either of them – she had retreated a few steps further into the kitchen, where Chorley wouldn't be able to see her, and was staring out the back door and down the steps into Walid's garden. Abdul followed the direction of her gaze, saw the six-foot, brick wall that separated his tangle of bushes from the house opposite, and made sure not to audibly catch his breath, his adrenaline prickling suddenly in his palms.

Chorley was standing now, peering out the curtains; beyond him, Abdul could see the flashing lights of police cars, which flashed off of the predatory, hungry look that was suddenly in Chorley's face. "Right on time," he said.

The glamour tugged at Abdul again, nearly sending his feet tripping; he gave briefly into it and walked over to Chorley’s side as he opened the front door. In the meantime, he balled his right hand into a loose fist at his hip.

“What is it you’re hoping to achieve?” he asked, not expecting a lucid answer.

Chorley ignored his question, probably thinking Abdul was unworthy of hearing anything about it, and instead gestured out towards the street; though Abdul could still see little of what lay outside the shield, he had the distinct impression that a crowd had gathered, of cars and men both. A moment later, Thomas’s – or Peter’s – presence was proven, as a dull _thud_ of testing magic crashed into the exterior of the barrier, and the air crackled.

Chorley was still looking down the steps, but leaned nonchalantly into Abdul’s side.

“Shall we make him watch?” he whispered.

Punching the Faceless Man right in the nose was quite one of the most satisfying things Abdul had ever done.

He got in a second attempt at the temple for good measure, and then, not wanting to push his luck as Chorley fell sideways into the doorjamb with a snarled curse, he turned on his heel and legged it through the kitchen. He was moving fast enough that he couldn’t spare a look at Lesley – nor, as he swept his hand haphazardly along the countertop, was he able to pause for long enough to get his ring back in his grasp, as it skittered onto the floor and vanished. The kitchen door – the steps down into the garden – by the time he reached the back wall he was winded and the door was already slamming open again behind him as he got a grip on the top of the bricks and hauled himself upwards.

And then the wall started disintegrating. On the bright side, it made it almost easier to clamber down it on its crumbling opposite side and into the empty alleyway on the side of his neighbor’s house that led out to Arlington Road – on the downside, the chunks of brick and mortar were whirling themselves up into a sharp, lethal, smashing hurricane under the influence of Chorley’s next spell, and if he didn’t get out of their way sharpish there would be nothing left of him to find but jellied bones.

He hit another wall, an invisible one, halfway down the alley – it hurt like hell, this time, as he bounced backwards off of thin air, and it was only then that he saw that the shield that had covered the front of the house was here, too. He looked upwards, and couldn’t see its edge; there were dulled, shadowy shapes beyond it, and maybe the murmur of voices – surely the police had figured out that this was an access point to the gardens and courtyards of the block – but nothing was clear enough for him to recognize.

“Damn it,” Abdul breathed.

He could not allow this, he thought, as he tried to put his scraped knuckles through the barrier. He would not allow Thomas to see this again, not ever; he would not allow Thomas Nightingale to ever again think he had been too late.

 _I refuse,_ he thought, and hit at the shield again with his open palm, hearing the clatter of bricks rising in a deadly tidal wave behind him. _Nolo, i nolunt, non concedam, dhi_ _ùlt mi, cha toir mi seachad –_

 

 *****

_There had been much to talk about on that evening in 2004, but Abdul found he was taking a while to get around to it; it was easy, in the course of the long summer twilight, to simply let his thoughts turn back upon themselves and be overwhelmed, either with incomprehension or a sort of stunned, quiet joy that he hadn’t yet quite realized was his own to be cherished._

_They were on one of the sofas in the library, finally, around ten, when Molly had tripped her happy way back to her domain and Thomas, clearly pleased with himself and with everything, was nursing half a glass of something that had probably been laid down in the Folly’s cellars in the nineteenth century; he had his free arm around Abdul’s chest where he was sitting sideways and leaning into Thomas’s side. Abdul himself was still looking at their agreement, folding the parchment back and forward in his hands, still working his way into realizing it was real._

_“Amendments are possible, of course,” Thomas said; when Abdul looked up and back at him he was smiling, one eyebrow raised, as though thinking of gift horses and mouths. “Go on, then. You’ve been thinking about it all night.”_

_“Well,” Abdul said, taking hold of Thomas’s wrist, knowing what he had to say was hardly pleasant. “Every modern contract these days has a release clause.”_

_“I don’t want one,” Thomas said instantly, studying his drink. “Do you?”_

_“Of course not. It’s not a matter of wanting,” Abdul said, pressing a brief kiss to Thomas’s palm to begin to convey his apology. “And it’s not for my sake, either. It’s for yours.”_

_Thomas was silent for a moment, and Abdul knew that, however much distress it was causing them both, he had at least caught the attention of Thomas’s rational mind. “What do you suggest, then?” he asked quietly._

_Abdul considered, and spoke slowly. “I, Thomas Nightingale, shall not abdicate any part of my protective duties as Master of the Folly on behalf of the safety of the aforementioned Walid.”_

_“Abdul,” Thomas said sadly, but Abdul wasn’t finished._

_“And that should such a sacrifice seem warranted, the aforementioned Walid shall release the Master from his oaths, and he shall bear no recrimination for it.”_

_Abdul paused, and gave Thomas a smile to try and reassure him that all of this, despite making him feel more at ease, only existed in theory. “Because I think I know the guilt you’d feel when I shuffle off this mortal coil, Thomas,” he added, “and I won’t have you wallowing in it.”_

_“Fine,” Thomas said, a touch briskly, though his attitude bore no obvious signs of irritation. “Have it your way. But write this also – ‘And that the aforementioned Walid will not put his backside in any danger to the best of his ramshackle ability, in order to spare the Master of the Folly any undue bloody grief.’”_

_Abdul laughed as Thomas passed him a pen, and put the agreement across his raised knees. “You can rest assured that that is implied, no matter what. I intend to stay firmly in my lab while you go haring out on your adventures – no more encounters with creatures for me.”_

_“Write it, Abdul,” Thomas said, more gently, and then he was leaning sideways to put his forehead against Walid’s, the cool touch of him sincere and quiet and longing. “Use whatever words you want, just – write that down. Please.”_

_“All right, all right,” Abdul said, smiling as he scribbled away on the edges of the parchment. “Keep your hair on, mo chridhe.”_

_He’d let slip the Scots endearment without thinking, and indeed for a few moments after he said it he didn’t realize what he had said; it was only when he felt Thomas’s grip tightening around him, holding him fast and immovable, that he understood that Thomas knew enough to translate, and that he was silent with the same sort of wonder that had crept up on Abdul again and again through the night. And he appreciated, suddenly, what Thomas was asking of him, what he himself had taken so blithely for granted: that yes, it was important, this assurance that, against all the pressures of time, he would keep himself present and whole and dedicated to his oaths until the last possible moment of his life._

_Thomas had never experienced that permanence – or if he had, it had been snatched away by the war, and by the next war, and by the pistol in David Mellenby’s hand. It would be his, Abdul’s, task not only to offer it, but to promise it._

_“Mo fhacal dhut,” he murmured. “My word for yours.”_

_Thomas breathed out against his temple, and didn’t need to say anything else._

*****

 

Abdul stumbled, hard; the air in front of him had suddenly become empty under his hands, and as he fell through it the blankness of the shield vanished and the shapes of the world became clear and sharp. Peter was not ten feet from him in the alleyway with Frank Caffrey and two other of Thomas’s paras – each holding an incredibly-sized machine gun – behind him, stiff with surprise, a crutch under one arm and his eyes popped out with shock.

“What the fuck,” Peter said.

One very small, distant part of Abdul’s brain was still working – was creating a to-do list, in fact. First, to get himself into an MRI machine, immediately and without fail. Second, to finally sit down and screw a hell of a lot of information out of the Ladies Linden-Limmer about the technicalities of non-Newtonian practice, damn the secrecy of their little cabal.

The vast majority of him, though, was simply and utterly exhausted, blanketed with a fatigue that seemed to go down into his bones, and he stumbled again as he tried to step forward, only fetching up without falling when Frank put a heavy hand around the back of his neck and held him up by it as though he were a newborn pet.

“I think,” he said thickly, and it was as if he had forgotten how to speak, and Allah help him, he would never be able to live it down with anyone he’d ever warned about the dangers of thaumaturgical degradation if he’d given himself a stroke – “I think I just did magic.”

“You demolished a fucking ninth-order shield, mate,” Peter spluttered, and then he yelped something wordless and Abdul finally got to get better acquainted with the very comfortable ground as Frank forced them all down into a tangled huddle: Peter was kneeling over them and was maintaining a shield of his own, his teeth gritted, against the slam of the garden wall bricks as they dashed themselves furiously towards them, exploding into sharp-smelling dust and fragments in mid-air when they failed to penetrate Peter’s spell.

“Fuck,” Peter forced out, his outstretched hand taut and shaking. “Come _on_ , boss – ”

The pressure lifted suddenly, and Peter staggered where he knelt; the remaining shards of brick fell with a series of snaps and cracks to the ground. Overtaking it all, however, was something which didn’t sound much better – a heavy _whump_ of percussive force shivered the air, and then, when Abdul looked back down the alley, he couldn’t really see much of his garden or anything else beyond it anymore, just lumps of sod and wood and masonry piled in heaps and thudding down out of the sky.

“Did my house just blow up?” he asked, bewildered.

“Maybe a bit,” Frank said. “C’mon – ”

He put his massive hands into Abdul’s armpits and half-carried, half-shoved him so that Abdul was sitting up against the alley’s wall. “Stay there for me, doctor. They’ll be able to come in and get you in a minute.”

“Alright,” Abdul nodded stupidly as Frank turned back to his gun, knowing that no, he was not going anywhere, not until he knew where Thomas was and that Thomas had proof of him still being among the living.

Quite absurdly, the one part of 32 Albert St which appeared to have survived the devastation, as the smoke and the dust cleared, was the brick-lined steps leading down from what had been the kitchen; everything above them was hollowed-out, wooden beams and concrete walls standing stark and shattered. A shape was standing at the top of them, and as it resolved itself into Thomas, standing there incongruously immaculate, with his staff outstretched, Abdul let out the breath he didn’t know he had been holding.

“It won’t work,” Thomas said, in a half-shout that managed to ring out as though he were bellowing orders across a battlefield. Abdul craned forward past Peter’s legs, and finally saw that Chorley was standing up in the muddy wreckage of the garden, holding up his own closed fist.

And then the Faceless Man was grimacing, and yelling with pain, and his hand was smoking; he opened it convulsively as it turned black and withered, and a small speck of silver fell to the earth.

“You cannot use my own wards against me,” Thomas pronounced, still in that same deep voice of proclamation, as he came down the stairs. “They were not made for you.”

“Hah,” Abdul said, and couldn’t help but grin; in his hazy state he couldn’t but think, as Peter looked briefly down at him, that if his ring was going to be lost, taking out one of Chorley’s limbs was its perfect final act.

“Peter,” Thomas said, and Peter started forward; Frank and the paras went with him, their weapons at their shoulders.

Abdul was never sure who had shouted _Now_ , or who fired first, or which fireball had been quickest to the mark. He suspected that the official cause of death, once everything was said and done, was going to be declared the nine-millimetre bullets fired at a brisk pace from three Heckler & Koch semi-automatics – in the defense of the public, of course.

And then the water came, rising up in a muddy surge from the torn-up ground of Abdul’s garden, up from the manhole cover in a corner of the driveway, whipping its way into a screaming gale, into a tornado, until Abdul had to bury his head in his knees to stop feeling like his eyes would be pulled out of his face by the force of it.

He might have ignored everything for a minute or two, after that.

“Hiya,” said a cheerful voice next to Abdul, eventually bringing him out of his stupor; he looked sideways to find that, while he was unawares, a river had sat down in the mud next to him. He was a white man, on the edge between being young and being respectably adult, and was the most hipster example of a Camden Town Londoner that Abdul had ever seen – his muscled, bare arms were covered in tattoos, his waistcoat was appropriately vintage, and his shoes, Abdul was almost miffed to see, were pristine – or had been pristine – doc martens of the sort Abdul’s own crowd had been so proud of in the 80s, with the hems of his jeans turned upwards above them. And then there was the beard, which must have taken hours a day to maintain.

“Regent,” he said with a white-toothed grin, holding out his hand to shake to Abdul, who mentally revised his classification of ‘river’ to ‘canal.’ “I heard one of my constituents was in trouble, and here I am.”

“Took you bloody long enough, posh boy,” said Beverley, who had appeared from the scrum of police cars and gaping pedestrians on Arlington Road to put a supportive arm around Peter’s waist.

Peter himself looked stunned as he looked back towards what was left of the house, brief flickers of emotion coursing across his face – disgust, and worry, and pure unforced elation. Abdul suspected they wouldn’t be getting many sincere words out of him for some time.

“There you are,” Thomas said, and then he was kneeling in front of Abdul, perfectly alive, perfectly safe and whole, and – Abdul could see immediately – at the sort of peace that was made of totally uncomplicated, unadulterated relief.

“Apparently I am,” Abdul said, working hard to string words together that meant anything.

“Well done,” Thomas murmured into his ear, his hands warm on Abdul’s jaw and neck. “You did so well, amor meus.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Abdul said, so very tired, and barely able to open his eyes. “I said I would.”

“You did,” Thomas said, even softer, half-strangled.

There were other hands on him now, professional, stern ones of the sort he recognized as belonging to his own medical folk, and he let them take him, even as he kept a grip on Thomas’s fingers, letting that touch tether him to the world. He would have to wake up soon – he would have to tell them about Lesley and her forbearance, he would have to decide whether he would ever bother to move out of the Folly again, he had to rebuild his lab, he would have to talk to Thomas for hours on end about many things –

But for now, he could sleep, knowing that he _would_ wake up again. And that was enough.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Woof. 
> 
> I've got a few other fics going in the fandom at the moment - if you'd like more in this series, drop me some prompts, as ever! Title from James Thomson's _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_ (1727). Thanks for reading!


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